I left the ending ambiguous, because that is the way life is.
This is something that I dream about: to live films, to arrive at the point at which one can live for films, can think cinematographically, eat cinematographically, sleep cinematographically, as a poet, a painter, lives, eats, sleeps painting.
I don't film messages. I let the post office take care of those.
I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. Each film I make is kind of a return to poetry for me, or at least an attempt to create a poem.
Sometimes you are in sync with the times, sometimes you are in advance, sometimes you are late.
I don't think you can in any way export culture with guns or tanks.
I remember being young in the 1960s. We had a great sense of the future, a great big hope. This is what is missing in the youth today. This being able to dream and to change the world.
Film students should stay as far away from film schools and film teachers as possible. The only school for the cinema is the cinema.
Every film I have made has corresponded to a very special moment of my life. I like to think that if someone wanted to reconstruct the story of my life, they can just see my movies and know what I have been through.
You live day by day. You can't build your life.
The movies I like are always movies where cinema is reinvented like if it was the beginning of cinema.
A dolly move is a moral commitment.
Pornography is not in the hands of the child who discovers his sexuality by masturbating, but in the heart of the adult who slaps him.
I am still against any kind of censorship. It's a subject in my life that has been very important.
English dialogues are always just what you need and nothing more - like something out of Hemingway. In Italian and in French, dialogues are always theatrical, literary. You can do more with it.
Sometimes I think that I understand my movies after I make them. Really. I go very often off of instinct.
A name? Oh, Jesus Christ. Ah, God, I've been called by a million names all my life. I don't want a name. I'm better off with a grunt or a groan for a name.
I was seduced by the nouvelle vague, because it was really reinventing everything. And the Italian cinema that one would see in the theaters in the late '50s, early '60s was Italian comedy, Italian style, which, to me, was like the end of neo-realism. I think cinema all over the world was influenced by it, which was Italy finding its freedom at the end of fascism, the end of the Nazi invasion. It was a kind of incredible energy. Then, late '50s, early '60s, the neo-realism lost its great energy and became comedy.
What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. 'The Dreamers' was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.
I'm no longer interested in making political films. There's something old-fashioned about them. Young people now don't care for politics. It isn't present in life as it used to be. And increasingly I like films which reflect present-day reality.
A monoculture is not only Hollywood, but Americans trying to export democracy.
As a loyal believer in the Auteur Theory I first felt editing was but the logical consequence of the way in which one shoots. But, what I learned is that it is actually another writing.
There's no more film; now everything's digital. I welcome this. It's fantastic for me to have a new chance.
I think that what I learned then, I didn't know I was learning. I just knew that I was very privileged to see somebody who was a writer, a great poet, and very smart-faced. Suddenly Pasolini becomes a director, so he has to invent cinema. It was like watching the invention of cinema. But I found out that Pasolini taught me a lot. It was, especially, the kind of respect that he had for reality. He had kind of epiphanies in his movies, like when a moment becomes full of grace, and it is like as if it was the most important moment in the life of a character.
The problem in Hollywood is that they try to become the only kind of cinema in the world, okay? The imposition everywhere of a unique culture, which is Hollywood culture, and a unique way of life, which is the American way of life. But Hollywood has forgotten that, in the past, what made Hollywood great and what made it go ahead was the fact that Hollywood was fed with, for example, Jewish directors coming from Germany or Austria and enriching Hollywood. In 15, 20 years, Hollywood became imperialistic. Cinema goes ahead when it is marriaged by other culture. Otherwise, it turns on itself.
